Blog Archives
Consequences
Codename: Warlock Book 2: No Limits follows an extraordinary man with the ability to read minds and use telekinesis who, despite trying to have a normal life and raise his daughter, gets pulled back into the world of crime, espionage, and deadly secrets. What inspired you to continue Tom Newell’s story in No Limits?
Tom doesn’t really have telepathy. He can’t read minds. He can sense emotions, intent, and deception. He can find you if he’s acquired your mental fingerprint. In No Limits, I wanted to explore more of the consequences of what Tom can do. For example, he can detect deception, but he can’t control what people do with the truth. He can help people, but he can’t create fairy tale endings. And I wanted to bring the story back to local incidents, not just government operations. Tom is still sought out by governments – ours and the USSR. But the Warlock infrastructure has deteriorated. And I wanted to focus on Tom, Gail, and their daughter Sue.
How does Tom’s family give him a different sense of purpose from the one he once received through Warlock, and how does becoming a father change his understanding of risk?
Tom is going to discover in No Limits that family is great – but comes with costs of its own. Especially when his abilities get involved. And Gail still has her rule – come home at any cost. Only it’s twice as important now. Tom has to make a difficult and legally murky decision to protect his family.
Tom struggles to balance his unique powers with the ordinary responsibilities of being a husband, father, and human being. What moral boundaries does Tom set for himself when using his abilities against people?
Tom doesn’t take advantage of people. Well, except for used-car dealers. But he slips a few times, sometimes in humorous ways. Sensing emotions can be tricky; it helps him navigate relationships, but it also causes him to sometimes navigate relationships with that ability when he should just do it the way everyone else does.
Can you tell us more about what’s in store for Tom Newell and the direction of the third book?
In book three, No Horizon, Tom has to make a life-altering decision with consequences that he can’t avoid. He’ll find one of his abilities comes with a cost he never anticipated. And his life is going to change when he is reminded that he can’t save everyone, with tragic personal consequences. But, spoiler alert, there is a hilarious Halloween party.
In a typical thriller series, the protagonist is in danger – that’s part of the excitement. But readers know in the back of their mind that the author is unlikely to kill off the protagonist – that would end the series. The real tension is how the protagonist survives whatever danger he’s facing. In the Warlock series, I lean into that. Tom is very hard to kill. The tension is how he solves the problem and then what the downstream effects are on Tom and everyone around him. Book four is going to extend that, with Tom having to navigate a difficult and painful personal crisis while still being Warlock. Sometimes survival isn’t about whether you live but how you continue to live. And the government is going to push the boundaries of what they expect Tom to do. To find out more, well, wait until book four comes out.
Author Links: Amazon
Tom and Gail now have a daughter, Susan. They are building a new life outside the shadow of covert government operations.
At home, Tom is trying to be normal. But Tom’s impossible abilities won’t stay hidden. Because Tom won’t ignore people in danger. And he’s learning that truth has consequences he can’t control.
But the government hasn’t forgotten Warlock.
Neither have the Soviets.
Both sides pull Tom into covert, deniable missions that shouldn’t exist. Deadly sleeper agents. Nuclear threats. Secrets that refuse to stay buried.
With a daughter to protect. Gail’s rule – come home at any cost – is more important than ever.
This time, No Limits.
Movie Stars and Moguls
A Good, Hard Slap is a historical Hollywood mystery about seven women determined to hide what they know about a movie star’s suspicious death. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’ve heard many stories over the years about how studios back in the Jazz Age were able to hide the bad behavior of their stars. There have also been some unsolved murders, which makes me wonder if they went unsolved due to studio interference. It’s a great subject for noir. I love noir, and now that I’ve finished the book, I see that I was keeping two noir tropes running through the plot of A Good, Hard Slap. The first is the story of basically decent people who devise a hair-brained plan to cover up a secret, and the second is the futility of trying to outsmart a powerful, corrupt system. My favorite example of the first is the film A Simple Plan (1998), based on the book of the same name by Scott Smith. That plot stayed with me for a long time, as did my favorite example of my second trope, Chinatown (1974), which is probably my favorite movie of all time. Chinatown influenced A Good, Hard Slap in many ways, including theme, plot, and the 1930s Los Angeles setting.
I was also influenced by Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng, which famously begins with “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” It’s the aftermath of the crime (or death) that most intrigues me, so I proceeded from a moment that I could build upon, increasing the tension on the characters who knew what had happened. When I studied screenwriting many moons ago, this was called “the propitious moment.” The backstory can be filled in as needed.
How did the murder mystery emerge from the historical setting?
The movie business is, of course, famous for the abuse of women, both the sexual kind and the power-wielding kind, which continues right up to the present day. More than a few powerful people (mostly men) have, since the early days of the industry, taken advantage of their power, and it was routinely unreported or covered up until the #MeToo movement went viral a decade ago. I like to call the time before that the “NotMe” era. Women went to great lengths to appear virtuous, hiding abuse that they knew would besmirch their reputations more than the reputations of their abusers. And, as the industry grew, the studios themselves got into the business of hiding the abuses of their most valuable assets – movie stars and moguls. Add to that the sexual mores of the time, which were still semi-Victorian – even in the Jazz Age, most middle-class women still wanted to be thought of as virgins before marriage. I wanted to explore how the convergence of movie-business abuse with the morality standards of the time could lead to murder. It wasn’t hard to imagine.
What sources were especially valuable during your research?
I guess I should begin with my personal experience. I was a steno myself at MGM in the 1970s. I worked for a variety of writers and producers who came to the lot during that time. I imagined the steno office and quiet room at Kaplan Talking Pictures to be like the ones in the Thalberg Building on the MGM lot. The biggest difference between Kaplan and MGM is that at MGM, even though all the stenos were women, our supervisor was a man!
Among the books that provided fodder for A Good, Hard Slap were The Fixers by E.J. Fleming, Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince by Budd Schulberg, and Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. The Fixers was especially eye-opening about the magnitude of the outrageous behavior of some of the most revered stars of the past. It was clear that the studios were in complete control of their stars’ images.
There were several movies and actors of the Jazz Age (and recent depictions of the Jazz Age) that helped me visualize Gracie’s world. Here are some that have invaded and colonized my mind over the years: Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man series, Betty Compson in The Docks of New York, Liv Lisa Fries in Babylon Berlin, Greta Garbo in just about anything, John Gilbert in A Woman of Affairs, Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong in Shanghai Express, the inimitable Buster Keaton in any of his silent films, and Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
What do you hope readers understand about the women who worked behind Hollywood’s stars?
One thing I tried to portray in the women of Kaplan Talking Pictures is the toughness they had to find in themselves to survive in a man’s world. It took moxie to keep going in an atmosphere where they were seen only as helpers to the “creative types.” On top of that indignity, they were also expected to endure sexual harassment as if it were something that could not be helped.
But even more importantly, I tried to explore their reasons for keeping secrets from each other. Sisterhood, in those days, did not necessarily involve honesty. There was so much shame involved in even the slightest slip in the morality of the time (even as the victim of abuse) that women kept their lips sealed for fear of being ostracized.
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Gracie Perkins and six other stenographers at Kaplan Talking Pictures know the film company’s most popular star has been murdered, something the moviegoing public will never know. The studio will tell the district attorney what to believe, and the district attorney will tell the LAPD and the newspapers what to believe. That’s the way it works. As the official story about the “unexpected” death comes out, the seven women don’t know if the studio has any idea what really happened, they only know they have to protect one of their own. They have a plan. But plans have a way of unraveling.
The plan is simple, and it seems to be working at first because Gracie can lie as believably as the studio’s publicity department. She hasn’t been honest about anything for a long time―she can’t be if she wants to keep her pals in the steno pool. They’re the only friends she has in this hard-luck life. She knows from experience that the truth can get you into a world of trouble. But Gracie’s talent for deception doesn’t fly with Detective Nick Zingarelli, who not only gets the real story out of the conflicted Miss Perkins, but eventually opens her eyes to the truth about love.
“A Good, Hard Slap” dives deep into the complicated relationships among the women of Kaplan Talking Pictures as they navigate the stormy seas of their hidden pasts and thwarted ambitions.
Strong Women
Bootlegger’s Apprentice follows a young bootlegger through the violence and glamour of Prohibition-era Chicago as he discovers that escaping the criminal underworld may be the only way to protect his family. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I fostered an interest in Irish American organized crime from on-screen stories such as The Departed and Boardwalk Empire, through histories of Prohibition Chicago, and fiction such as Don Winslow’s City on Fire trilogy and Mary Miley’s Spirits and Smoke. My family is heavily influenced by my Irish American Grandma Margaret Miller (nee McCarthy), and I combined that with my own experience growing up Catholic (I am now Agnostic) surrounded by strong women to create Aiden McCarthy.
How did you balance real figures and events with Aiden’s fictional journey?
Figures like Louis Armstrong and Mezz Mezzrow, along with real clubs, allow me to really explore Aiden’s interaction with the jazz scene, intoxication, and the experience of African Americans. Much like my own growth from a predominantly white childhood to encountering folks of all different skin colors, Aiden finds beauty in those with different backgrounds. I wrote Aiden’s story to respect and be real about history and race. His friendship with William Crutchfield, Dean O’Banion’s actual porter, is written as a nod to my own experience. I aim to give the story more flavor.
Aiden grows from being bootlegging muscle to club negotiator to having to kill in self-defense. I textured his moral journey with actual events in Dean O’Banion’s history where O’Banion’s hubris eventually gets the best of him. Aiden comes to terms with life-and-death decisions as O’Banion makes a fatal mistake.
The novel writes O’Banion with a certain degree of charity, but he really was rather open-minded for his day on African Americans and homosexuals. “They can’t help how they are” is a direct quote from an O’Banion biography.
Al Capone, Johnny Torrio, and various politicians and police who encounter Aiden and O’Banion allow me to inject a certain amount of authenticity into how I imagine Jazz Age Chicago. I enjoy figures such as crusading journalist Robert St. John, who formed an uneasy defiance to Capone and is interesting to me because of my background in journalism. The corruption really existed as portrayed, but I did take quite a bit of liberty to make one of O’Banion’s antagonists into a juicy character.
The novel handles Al Capone as a human who cares for his family, his partially deaf son, and his older brother mainly. He is also a thug driven by an inability to cope with sorrow (no spoilers) and his place in the mob hierarchy.
At what point in developing the novel did you know that Aiden would spare Capone and bargain for his family’s safety instead?
Al Capone has to live, but I want Aiden to really challenge his morality when it comes to using lethal force. Aiden has a certain ethical code, sees the logic in his decisions, and is supported by strong women to make better choices. I don’t want to give away any spoilers.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I have started a prequel to my Ron & Carey series. The series is about an Army veteran, Ron McCallister, who charms adversaries and his lover alike while outmaneuvering crooked politicians and bloodthirsty thugs from 2008 to 2009. I want to explore Ron’s return from Iraq around 2005 and run-ins with the Chicago Outlaw Motorcycle Club and corrupt authorities as he reconciles his new reality and eventual introduction to a stripper with a heart of gold. While Ron broods and kicks ass, his Aunt Peggy serves up homespun spitfire, much like my Grandma Margaret and Great Aunt Ethel.
I’ll maybe publish it in about five or so years. Good stories take time!
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Chicago, 1924. Prohibition has made criminals rich, politicians dangerous, and loyalty a currency all its own.
Aiden McCarthy is a young Irish American drawn toward a life far more dangerous than arranging bouquets.
Working under notorious gangster and florist Dean O’Banion, Aiden is drawn deeper into a world where bootleg whiskey, political corruption, and organized crime collide, and where men like Johnny Torrio and Al Capone are reshaping Chicago from the shadows.
Yet amid the violence and intrigue, Aiden has something worth protecting. His relationship with Sophia Golino offers the promise of a life separate from the dangerous men who increasingly depend upon him.
Around them, the clubs and speakeasies of Jazz Age Chicago pulse with music, temptation, and shifting social boundaries.
As rival gangs maneuver for power and a bitter political struggle threatens to turn deadly, Aiden must learn quickly whom to trust, when to fight, and just how much of himself he is willing to sacrifice to survive.
A richly imagined historical crime novel of gangsters, romance, jazz, family, faith, and ambition, set against one of Chicago’s most notorious eras.
Step into Prohibition-era Chicago, where love, loyalty, and one wrong choice can cost everything.
Gelding Rock
K. E. Thompson’s Gelding Rock, the second novel in the Stewart’s Camp series, is an ambitious work of historical and contemporary fiction built around buried crimes, damaged people, and the uneasy relationship between guilt and redemption. The novel moves primarily between 1997 and 2010, with earlier episodes reaching back into the history of Stewart’s Camp and the nearly abandoned community of Gelding Rock. At its center is the improbable relationship between Adelyn O’Malley, an elderly woman who has lived alone for years, and Hartford Daniels, a predatory and deeply troubled man who arrives at her home after becoming stranded during a storm. Thirteen years later, young friends Jacob Moses and Ruthie begin uncovering the physical remains and secrets left by an earlier mudslide, while retired detective Harold Capps revives his interest in Hartford’s long-unsolved disappearance. These strands gradually converge into a story in which the excavation of old objects becomes inseparable from the excavation of memory.
The novel’s greatest strength is its treatment of character, particularly Adelyn and Hartford. Thompson gives neither of them a simple moral identity. Adelyn is vulnerable, funny, traumatized, lonely, nurturing, and capable of alarming decisions. Hartford enters the novel with a clear awareness of his own cruelty, yet years of isolation, physical suffering, work, and companionship alter the way he understands himself and other people. His development is deliberately uncomfortable because the book never requires the reader to erase what he has done in order to recognize what he later becomes. Adelyn’s history provides a parallel examination of how violence can remain active in a person decades after the event itself. Near the end, the narrator observes of her past, “It wasn’t so easy to escape one’s self.” That sentence captures much of the novel’s psychological argument: time can change a life profoundly, but it doesn’t automatically dissolve memory, responsibility, or injury.
Thompson balances this darker material with an unusually broad ensemble and a distinctive vein of humor. Jacob Moses and Ruthie give the 2010 sections curiosity and momentum as their amateur investigation moves from artifacts in the mud to family history, hidden documents, and finally Gelding Rock itself. Their friendship also provides an emotional counterweight to the adult characters, whose relationships have often been shaped by secrecy, regret, and avoidance. The book’s shifts in viewpoint allow the same events to acquire different meanings depending on who is watching, and its references to Crime and Punishment reinforce its interest in confession, punishment, conscience, and the burden of concealed wrongdoing. The historical material involving Harriet Stewart deepens that inquiry further. Her attempt to protect the young Adelyn becomes another morally complicated act whose consequences reach across generations, connecting the novel’s mystery structure to its larger questions about whether violence can ever be cleanly divided into victims, perpetrators, protectors, and bystanders.
What makes Gelding Rock especially affecting for me is that its mysteries serve a story about human connection. The resolution of Hartford’s disappearance matters, as do the buried histories of Stewart’s Camp, but the book’s emotional culmination belongs to Adelyn, Ruthie, and Hartford as the past and present finally occupy the same room. Ruthie’s willingness to become, for a dying woman, the long-lost Harriet she needs is one of the novel’s most moving developments. In Adelyn’s final consciousness comes the simple realization, “And if she was loved, everything was alright.” The novel earns that sentiment by placing it beside decades of fear, shame, violence, loneliness, and compromised choices. Gelding Rock is therefore both a mystery and a character-driven meditation on conscience, trauma, forgiveness, and the forms of grace people sometimes extend to one another. Thompson’s combination of dark subject matter, eccentric humor, historical layering, and compassionate characterization gives the novel a strong identity and an ending that brings its many timelines together with considerable emotional force.
Pages: 298 | ASIN : B0GLKBSHYM
The Firehand File
The Firehand File, by Bob Van Laerhoven, is a historical noir thriller set largely in the feverish Berlin of 1921, where political extremism, organized crime, artistic rebellion, poverty, drugs, and old wartime wounds keep colliding. At its center is Chaim Orlosow, a Jewish police inspector whose investigation of the grotesque Skinner murders gradually crosses paths with a much more dangerous secret: a psychiatric file built from supposed diary entries belonging to the young Adolf Hitler. Around Orlosow, Van Laerhoven assembles an unusually large cast, including French spy Claire Lesaumier, living under the name Elise Kraiser, psychiatrist Heinz Baumgart, Flemish poet Paul van Ostaijen, two endangered Jewish children, and historical figures such as Rudolf Hess, Magnus Hirschfeld, Albert Einstein, and Soghomon Tehlirian. The result is part murder investigation, part espionage story, part portrait of a society discovering how quickly ugly ideas can move from private obsession into public life.
What gives the novel its particular personality is the way Van Laerhoven tells it. The chapters are short and restless, shifting rapidly between characters and interrupting the main narrative with diaries, letters, newspaper pieces, psychiatric commentary, and Paul van Ostaijen’s deliberately unruly “Drunk Poet” passages. Berlin feels less like a backdrop than a nervous system that everybody shares. Its cafés, cabarets, streets, political rallies, brothels, police offices, and drug culture constantly feed the characters’ fears and appetites. The book can be graphic about sex, murder, antisemitism, child exploitation, and addiction, but that extremity belongs to the world it’s constructing. Even the dark humor has a purpose. People joke, perform, philosophize, get drunk, and make art while something much more sinister is assembling around them. That combination of intellectual conversation, vulgarity, menace, and absurdity gives the novel a strange, energetic pulse.
The strongest idea running through the book is that stories have consequences. Characters rewrite their own memories, turn trauma into explanations, turn explanations into beliefs, and eventually turn beliefs into permission for violence. Claire can’t settle on a single version of her childhood. Paul turns other people’s suffering into literature. Baumgart treats psychological speculation as political opportunity. The Firehand material itself becomes dangerous because different people want to decide what story it tells about Hitler. Orlosow eventually arrives at the thought that people make their worlds real through stories, which neatly gathers together much of what the novel has been doing for hundreds of pages. The final sections underline that idea especially well: one copy of the file is destroyed almost casually, another survives into 1941 and is treated as questionable intelligence, while history continues on its terrible course.
I’d recommend The Firehand File to readers who enjoy historical crime fiction with a literary streak, especially anyone fascinated by Weimar Germany, early Nazism, European avant-garde culture, political espionage, or psychologically complicated characters. Readers who like novels built from several voices and intersecting lives will have plenty to dig into here, and those comfortable with explicit violence, sexuality, addiction, and disturbing subject matter will be best suited to its darker passages. For me, Orlosow is the character who gives the book its emotional weight. His decision to stop merely observing the ugliness around him and risk himself for Isaiah, Mara, and Claire turns the closing movement toward something unexpectedly humane. When they reach South Africa, his answer to the question of whether they’ll be happy is simple: they won’t wait for happiness; they’ll work for it. After everything the novel has shown about people constructing destructive versions of reality, that choice feels like its most meaningful answer.
Pages: 481 | ASIN : B0GGXYZVRD
Echoes of Fortune: Knights of the Golden Circle
Echoes of Fortune: The Knights of the Golden Circle, by David R. Leng, is a historical thriller that blends Civil War secrets, modern conspiracy, coded messages, and treasure-hunt adventure. The story follows historian Jack Sullivan, along with Emma, Priya, Steve, and their allies, as they uncover a hidden legacy tied to Jefferson Davis, Confederate gold, and the real secret society known as the Knights of the Golden Circle. What begins as a historical puzzle grows into something much larger and more dangerous, moving between the final days of the Confederacy and a present-day threat that reaches into the highest levels of power.
I enjoyed the way the book treats history as something alive and unsettled. Leng does not just use the past as decoration. He lets it press against the present, sometimes like a warning and sometimes like a buried fuse. The Civil War chapters have a cold, tense atmosphere, and the modern scenes move with the quick pulse of a conspiracy thriller. I liked how Jack’s academic curiosity keeps pulling him forward, even when common sense says to stop digging. That felt true to the genre. In a historical thriller, the best discoveries should feel both exciting and dangerous, and this book understands that.
The author makes some bold choices with scope. This is not a small mystery tucked inside an archive. It grows into a sprawling adventure with politics, military action, secret networks, old codes, and personal stakes. At times, that scale gives the story real momentum. At other times, I felt the book was trying to carry a lot at once, especially when the plot shifts from a research-driven mystery into high-level national danger. Still, I appreciated the ambition. The relationships also help ground the larger plot. Jack and Emma’s bond, Priya’s sharp mind, and Steve’s loyalty give the story a human center, so the book is not only about maps, symbols, and hidden treasure. It’s about trust, fear, obsession, and what people inherit from history without always realizing it.
I recommend Echoes of Fortune: The Knights of the Golden Circle to readers who enjoy historical thrillers with a strong conspiracy angle, especially fans of secret societies, Civil War mysteries, coded clues, and fast-moving adventure. If you like stories where old documents can open dangerous doors, this book will likely pull you in. It’s best for readers who enjoy a big, cinematic plot and don’t mind when the stakes keep rising far beyond the first mystery.
Pages: 647 | ASIN : B0H46XN5CG
The Price Tag
Hold On for Dear Life follows three MIT friends who turn a crypto idea into a company and are forced to live with the consequences of their success. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration was something I witnessed and something I felt myself.
I spent twenty-five years in institutional finance, with the last decade inside the digital asset and blockchain world. I was in the rooms during the 2017 crypto boom. The ICO pitches and launches, the treasury meetings, the conference stages, the conversations that happened when the market stopped agreeing with you. I looked at the situation from a different angle than these founders because I had market experience.
The thing that stayed with me that no article or non-fiction account ever captured correctly was the idealism. These were not grifters or speculators. It wasn’t about getting rich quick for the true founders. They were people who believed, with real conviction, that they were changing how money works. And they were right about the technology. They were people who had looked at a financial system and wanted it focused on people, not institutions. The system that charges a week’s worth of groceries to send money across a border, and they said, “we can fix this”. The belief was genuine. The mission was real.
What they hadn’t reckoned with was the cost of being right in a world that was moving much faster than anyone’s wisdom could keep pace with.
What the novel is actually about is what happens to people who believe something genuinely important when the world gives them more success than they were ready for. The gap between the conviction and the capacity to hold it is where the interesting human material lives. I needed fiction to tell that story. No other form could get inside it the way a novel can.
Charlie, Jack, and Nik each represent very different strengths. How did these characters develop?
Before I outlined the storyline, I developed the characters — because they are the story. The plot is what happens to them. The characters are what the book is about.
I started with three relationships to ambition because I had observed three distinct versions of it in the real world.
There is the ambition that is genuinely mission-driven. That wants to build something true and is vulnerable to the world that surrounds the building. The person who believes so completely in what they are creating that they don’t see the version of themselves being slowly shaped by the world, the mission requires them to inhabit.
There is the ambition that is architectural. That is Precise, invisible, load-bearing, and deeply personal about what it will and won’t sacrifice. The person who builds the thing that makes everything else work and pays the price of that in ways nobody around them fully sees.
And there is the ambition that is performed. That has learned to be the most compelling person in every room and has, over time, confused the performance for the self.
Charlie began as the mission. Jack began as the architecture. Nik began as the energy. And together they made the kind of team that can raise thirty million dollars in a single night because you need all three. You need the person who means it, the person who builds it, and the person who makes the world believe in it.
The novel is the story of what each of those strengths costs. The price tag. Charlie’s mission makes him vulnerable to visibility. Jack’s precision makes her carry things in silence. Nik’s performance makes him, eventually, unable to find himself underneath it.
I started with three strengths. The story arrived when I started asking what each strength was quietly destroying.
What role does fear play in shaping the founders’ decisions once the company becomes successful?
The specific fear I was most interested in writing is the kind that arrives with success rather than before it.
Before the ICO launch, the fears are obvious. Will it work? Will anyone believe in it? Will the technology hold? Those fears are clean and navigable. They have a shape.
The fears that arrive after success are stranger. They are the fears of people who have gotten what they wanted and are now terrified of losing it or of being revealed as somehow unworthy of it. And those fears do not announce themselves as fear. They arrive dressed as decision-making.
Nik’s 3 AM trade is the clearest example. He is not greedy. He is afraid of being the person in the room who failed to find the shortcut that everyone assumed he would find. So he calls the trade a hedge. He calls it runway. He calls it responsible treasury management. And in the specific logic of 3 AM, it is all of those things.
He sleeps fine afterward. That is the most frightening detail in the book. Because it tells you how completely the fear has disguised itself as certainty.
Charlie’s fear operates differently. It comes more slowly, more quietly, more insidiously. He is afraid of losing the thing he believes in most, which is the mission. And the way that fear manifests is in the opposite of what you might expect. Instead of protecting the mission, he starts protecting the version of himself that the world has built around the mission. The panels, the press, and the conference stages are not vanity. They are Charlie’s attempt to stay close to the thing he cares about. But the version of Charlie that the world is rewarding is not quite the version that wrote the whitepaper’s first line. The fear of acknowledging that gap of looking directly at the distance between who he was and who he is becoming is what keeps him from correcting it.
Jack’s fear is the most interior and the most precisely controlled. She is afraid of exactly one thing, of losing what they already have, and she manages that fear with a discipline so complete that she has turned it into a virtue. The not-actionable file. The thirty seconds in the bathroom. The voice that does not waver. All of it is fear, managed with extraordinary precision. The novel asks whether that precision is wisdom or avoidance. I genuinely do not know the answer. I think both things are true simultaneously.
What I hoped to do with all three of them is show that the fears that matter most in this story are not the fears before success. They are the fears that success creates. The fear of being exposed as unworthy. The fear of losing the self that started the thing. The fear of saying out loud the thing that might change everything. Those are the fears that make the decisions. And those are the fears that none of them at the time would have called fear at all.
What is the next book you are working on, and when will it be available?
My first book, published with Wiley, From Hoodies to Suits: Innovating Digital Assets for Traditional Finance is available. It is a non-fiction industry primer. I’m excited for the idea of my next novel, which hasn’t come to me yet.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Instagram | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Three friends. One impossible idea. Thirty million dollars raised overnight. And a question none of them thought to ask until it was almost too late.
In the summer of 2017, Charlie, Jack, and Nik leave MIT believing they can change how the world moves money. Within months, they are exactly the kind of company that gets written about. Within two years, they are nearly destroyed by it.
A Story About Everything That Almost Broke
Hold On for Dear Life is a literary fiction novel about idealism, hubris, and resilience – and the long, difficult work of finding your way back to why you started.
What waits inside:
A friendship that almost doesn’t survive success
A love story three years in the making
A market crash, a hack, a kidnapping
A debut novel by a real Wall Street and crypto executive
Have you ever bet on something the world told you to walk away from?
Have you ever built something with the people closest to you and watched the building change them?
This isn’t a book about cryptocurrency.
It’s a book about what survives when everything else burns – and what it costs to find out.
Among the best literary fiction books written at the intersection of ambition, friendship, and financial ruin – this is fiction for adults who know that the hardest losses aren’t always measured in money.
If Normal People stayed with you, if Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow lingered for weeks, this is the next book you cannot put down.
Hold On for Dear Life
Hold On for Dear Life, by Annelise Osborne, is a startup novel about three MIT friends who turn a crypto idea into a company, then have to live with everything that success brings. Charlie is the technical visionary, Jack is the builder who keeps the system honest, and Nik is the magnetic operator who knows how to make people believe. Their company, Advantage, begins with a real ideal: to make financial systems faster, fairer, and easier for ordinary people to use. One of the book’s cleanest lines comes from Jack, who says, “The complexity has to be invisible.” That idea runs through the whole story, not just as product philosophy, but as a measure of what the characters are trying to do with their own lives.
What makes the book engaging is how closely it ties technology to people. The crypto world here isn’t just charts, tokens, conferences, and hype. It’s late nights in Williamsburg, awkward co-founder dinners, Telegram chaos, security audits, jealousy, ambition, and the strange intimacy of building something with people who know you too well. Osborne is especially good at showing how a company’s culture forms in small moments, like who stays late, who notices risk, who gets credit, and who quietly carries the weight no one else can see.
The novel also has a strong sense of momentum. The early chapters capture the rush of 2017 crypto idealism, when every meetup feels like a doorway, and every new user feels like proof. As Advantage grows, the story widens into a sharp look at visibility and its cost. Public attention becomes capital, then pressure, then danger. After the stakes rise, Jack’s explanation lands with chilling simplicity: “Because people are watching.” It’s a line that reframes the whole book, turning success from something shiny into something exposed.
The strongest character work belongs to the trio at the center. Charlie’s belief in systems, Jack’s discipline, and Nik’s hunger for recognition each feel tied to something deeper than plot mechanics. Their mistakes make sense because they grow naturally out of their gifts. Nik’s recklessness comes from the same drive that helps Advantage get noticed. Jack’s control is what saves the company, but it also keeps her feelings boxed away. Charlie’s idealism gives the story its heart, especially when the book shifts from trading infrastructure to a stablecoin built around real-world access and remittances.
By the end, Hold On for Dear Life becomes a story about what founders hold onto after the hype burns off. It’s about rebuilding with more humility, choosing steadiness over spectacle, and learning that contribution can matter more than winning the loudest room. The final part, centered on USDA and the promise of cheaper cross-border payments, gives the novel a satisfying sense of purpose. This is a thoughtful and relatable book about innovation, friendship, and the personal cost of trying to build something that actually works.
Pages: 415 | ASIN : B0GX3B63RM
